1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a real-time contents editing method, system, and program which are adapted to edit a large number of images, including live images, and/or voices which are present in a disposed fashion on the Internet and to distribute the edited images and voices to a plurality of users.
2. Description of the Related Art
Broadband networks, which have prevailed in recent years, enable distribution of moving-picture contents of large volumes. Since 2001, a great increase in the number of ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) subscribers has been paving the way for a broadband environment. At the present time (as of March 2002), in Japan, 7.3% of all households subscribe to ADSL or CATV, and can receive data at a rate of about 1 to 10 Mbps and send data at a rate of about several hundreds kbps. Further, FTTH (Fiber To The Home) promises to prevail in the future; this is expected to enable communications at up to 100 Mbps (maximum speed), as well as exchange (transmission and reception) of bulk moving-picture data between users.
Consequently, many services and tools for distributing images and voices via a broadband network have been proposed. To this end, high-quality image distribution systems utilizing broadband; e.g., Ruff Systems and DVTS, have been proposed. Ruff Systems is a system that distributes, on TCP/IP, non-compressed D1/HDTV pictures and DV streams, the streams being taken by video cameras. Ruff Systems requires a wide band, because non-compressed images and DV images are sued, but can distribute images in high quality. Meanwhile, many existing systems and tools utilize the MPEG moving picture format or the H.323 standard, which copes with narrow bands (see the following publications 3 to 6). These systems and tools (applications) enable a personal computer to receive, via the Internet, images taken by a camera. However, these applications are designed to handle a single moving picture, and therefore, are not suitable for handling a large number of moving pictures.
Other pertinent technologies include the ohphone H.323 endpoint application, the FFmpeg Multimedia System, the Coriander Linux graphical user interface (GUI) for controlling a digital camera through the IEEE 1394 bus, and “Experiments for Real-time MPEG-4 Visual Encoder” by Yasuyuki Miura and Michitetsu Katsumoto, Research Paper of Information Processing Society of Japan, 2002-DPS-100, pp. 25-30, 2002.